


Libertas Est

by jamlocked



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 16:26:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6914614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamlocked/pseuds/jamlocked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is not lost, Jim is not sad, Jim is free. Until he's not.</p><p>Wrote this off a prompt for somewhere else (<i>Lost, Euphoria, Binding</i>), figured it might as well go here too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lost

‘…yesterday, we lost one of the most promising young men to ever pass through the corridors of this school.’

James Moriarty, class 2F, looks down at the floor on which he sits. Everyone else is crying, so he cries too, a stream of silent tears that fall unchecked and drip into the black polyester of his shorts. He hasn’t had a bath since yesterday morning. The chlorine still lingers on his skin.

‘Carl was a friend to all of you, a decent lad with the brightest future ahead of him. We’re all sure he would have gone on to great things, not just with his swimming career but as a good man, who would have lived a good life. It’s cruel that he’s been taken from us, but we can’t forget that while we knew him he made our lives better, and we must be thankful for that. His family have asked me to say that any pupil who wishes to attend his funeral will be most welcome. Please join me in a prayer.’

The whole assembly bows its head, an action trained into every child since day one of school. Jim does not glance around to sneer at them. He hangs his head too, and thinks, _does being able to swim fast make you promising?_ He sniffs, and wipes his nose on his sleeve. He’s at the end of a row, and the teacher in the chair watching them lowers a hand, and squeezes his shoulder. He looks up. Her eyes are closed, tears leaking through sodden lashes. He thinks, _you didn’t lose anything that matters._

The funeral is in a Protestant church, where the rituals are familiar but not at all the same. He watches with interest as Carl is dispatched with quiet ease, extra tragedy because of his age and the terrible circumstances of his accident. He cries a bit more, not that anyone’s looking at him or can hear anything above the sobs of the mother. People stand around afterwards, saying _a tragic loss, just tragic,_ and Jim thinks about Carl’s trainers, wrapped up in plastic in the rafters of the garage at home, where no one ever goes. He’s always wanted a pair of Air Max. 

Back in Ireland for the summer, he detours into the familiar ground of Catholicism. He hadn’t meant to go to confession, his parents only insist on it at Easter. But he’s curious about something he heard on their last trip back home, so he dumps his BMX at the door and waits his turn.

‘Do you lose your soul if you kill someone, Father?’ he asks, after racing through the initial prayer.

‘Most certainly son, unless you truly repent and ask forgiveness. There’s nothing the Lord won’t forgive, if you mean it.’

‘Father, I killed a boy.’

There’s a soft exhalation of breath on the other side of the grating. Jim can hear him thinking. Can _feel_ him coming to the conclusion that he’s having his leg pulled.

‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Why would you say that, lad?’

‘Because it’s true. Father, do you lose your soul if you touch the arse’s of your altar boys when they’re getting changed after Mass? Or when you tell them they’re helping God when you make them-‘

‘What are y-!?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ He kicks his heels into the legs of the stool he’s sitting on. Father Doyle’s breathing is fast, and laboured. ‘Father, do you lose your soul if you take money from the Church when it could go to orphans, or the roof fund, or to buy more whiskey for the Bishop?’

Back in England for the start of the new term, Jim has enough cash to buy his own pair of Nikes. Ten pairs, twenty pairs. He remembers he forgot to make Father Doyle absolve the sin of murder - it’d be worth a few Hail Marys possibly - and is annoyed at himself for missing the detail. But he’ll see him again at Christmas and anyway, if you can lose your soul that easily then it probably isn’t worth hanging on to in the first place.


	2. Euphoria

They finally let him skip a couple of years at school. It should have happened years ago, but there’s this new drive to not push kids on too fast, depth of knowledge over breadth or something equally stupid. But the fact of it is there are no secondary-level maths teachers who know anything he doesn’t any more. The physics teacher has begged to have him removed from the class because he spends his time showing him up, and the other kids just laugh all the way through the lesson. (He’s popular, Jim. As long as you’re part of the fun on his terms, and don’t ask him to give anything he doesn’t want to.) 

So anyway, he sits his GCSEs at fourteen and his A Levels at sixteen, and Trinity say he can’t enrol for his undergrad degree yet, but he’s welcome to help himself to the library and they even fix him up with a job in the emerging computer department while he’s waiting to age into his brain. It’s not a _real_ job, because he doesn’t need the money; the university are going to pay everything, have supplied him with books, are happy for him to expand his interests in the year he has before they can stretch the rules and let him officially join. He plays with computers from 8am until lunch, eats half a sandwich and then disappears into the library. And that is his mistake. That is where it all goes wrong.

Jim loves computers. While people are oohing and aaahing over being able to write letters without using paper, he’s imagining the world run by numbers, on screens, at the touch of a button. But this love is for its utility; it’s not the devouring love that comes from fascination of the unknown. Not like when other people meet someone, and fall for them as they try to learn all their secrets. No, Jim saves his passion for the stars, because there’s always more of them, they take up so much of everything, he can map his mind out over them and there’s _space_. No matter how many thoughts he has, the universe expands to fit them. Jim reads about philosophy, and history, and the science of thought; he devours numbers and equations and twists them around until they fit in ways people haven’t written about yet, and he’s writing them down and thinking about sharing them when, quite suddenly one day, he remembers Carl. Carl, who was one of the most promising boys ever to walk through that school. Carl, who couldn’t understand a non-linear equation after it had been explained to him four times; Carl, who was a year younger, and swam faster, and laughed at him in the changing rooms and called him a queer. 

Thinking of Carl makes him think of Father Doyle, who killed himself two years ago when it got out that he had been stealing church funds, and possibly abusing boys. Jim’s dad told them about it when they came back after Easter that year ( _Father, do you lose your soul if you kill yourself?_ ), and he’d been very sad ( _Father, what do you lose if you stop paying?_ ), very sad indeed, ( _Repent, Father. Mean it._ ), because he never did get around to asking for absolution for Carl’s murder.

He’s reading about the heat death of the universe when it happens. That moment where it comes to him that all the things he’s been holding inside - the curiousity about death, the nagging sensation of whether he might actually go to hell, the way he just can’t seem to stop hating everyone, the boredom, the race against his own brain to be _better_ already, to achieve something no one else has; the ambition to show how good he is versus the part of his nature that knows it belongs in the shadows….it all comes together, and flares into a sun, which then burns out, turns cold, crumbles into dust and blows out into the stars.

Even the universe will die one day. No matter what he achieves, no matter what he learns, no matter what he contributes, even if he comes up with a theorem that lasts until the end of time…there will _be_ an end of time. There will be a point where there is simply nothing left to understand anything he’s done. Anything anyone’s done. He has long been aware that this tiny planet holds every human thought ever pushed out of a mouth or pen, and that when it dies all that will be lost…but to know that the universe itself is not immortal is a whole other thing.

Jim sits in the library for twenty four hours, the book clutched to his chest. By the end of that time, after the despair is gone, he’s floating in a haze of pure euphoria. Because he is free. Because nothing matters. Nothing he does, nothing anyone else does, nothing he thinks or says or kills. There is no guilt, there is no God, there is nothing to do but waste his time on Earth in whatever manner pleases him most.

It is a beautiful, heady, sensation. It’s the most pure thing he has ever felt in his life. It’s the closest he’s ever come to understanding what love might be like, the joy of giving yourself to something else. He could never give himself to a person, but he can give himself to freedom.


	3. Binding

But there are constraints, of course. They come in the form of convention, and the narrowness of everyone else alive. They come in blue uniforms, or - in the six months he spends in Belfast later on - in British Army fatigues. They don’t - can’t - bind him, because even if he got arrested and threw him into a cell, they couldn’t stop his mind streaming through the stars, so far above no one could ever touch it. He’s not married to the idea of free air the way most people are, but it does mean he can get rich, which means more fun in other ways. So he doesn’t get caught, and he still goes to university, and after he graduates he goes to another one, and then another, and when he’s achieved the pinnacle of academic achievement he burrows into the numerical glory of the computer system, and erases all trace of his existence. Freedom comes from no one being able to tell who you are, or where you’ve been.

He leaves no footprints in any country, but slides through them all. His name is his calling card, whispered in the right ears and passed along on the breeze. No ties, no face, no fingerprints on any crime, nothing to keep him anywhere. There’s only one place he circles back to and that’s London, not because of the house - which he does buy; not because he likes it - though he does; not because of convenience - though it is perfectly placed for operations, the right nearness and distance both, big enough to hide in, rich enough to not look at him twice. No, he circles London because of a coat, and a mop of stupid black curls, and a _mind_ that, to all appearances, looks like it might just be able to keep up.

Sherlock Holmes is a familiar name, and has been for a long time. He never dared hope that it would remain interesting all this time, because surely the boy would meet a steady hand that would guide him along a path of academic glory; surely the young man would meet a boy or a girl and fall in love, and die along the road of intellect crushed by emotion; surely the twenty-something would find a corporate job, or write a book, or get folded into his big brother’s cloying, suffocating, embrace.

But Sherlock rejects all steady hands. Sherlock doesn’t bother with other bodies, or even his own. Sherlock likes drugs more than glory, and crime more than anything, and actively bites at Mycroft’s loving palm. Sherlock, against all odds, remains interesting. Jim can't stop watching. Jim doesn’t care that a few of his more interesting schemes get foiled in unexpected ways. He sometimes finds himself rooting for Sherlock to see that detail no one else would think to look at it, to pull at the right thread and make his plan fall apart. It becomes a new kind of euphoria, bested only by the challenge of making the next puzzle harder than the last.

Everything has a pinnacle. Everything peaks, and falls. Sometimes forever, sometimes just to ready itself for greater heights. Jim watches Sherlock meet John Watson, and reads along with growing numbers in the city who have noticed his name thanks to that blog. Sherlock is no longer his own shining star. He’s diluted by the presence of lesser minds, and Jim is free in all sorts of other ways for a while, as his mind lets go and rages at the injustice of it. He left it too long. It’s Father Doyle all over again. He timed it wrong, forgot the absolution - in this case, did not consummate early enough, and now he has to pick up the pieces and drive on to the only conclusion that matters.

Jim has always been honest with himself, and he has to face the truth on the night he could stay in Prague and go to the opera, but instead flies back to London to find a bedsit to crash in, and watch what Sherlock’s doing on a case. A case that isn’t even one of his. It’s then that he realises that after all this time, after all this effort…he’s been caught after all. He stayed in too long, and now he can’t get free.

It’s not acceptable. Jim doesn’t belong to a family, a nation, a planet. He’s part of an infinite universe and wants to die that way; he will not be bound to a _person_. He tied himself to the idea of freedom a long time ago, and he’s not going to give it up now. 

It’s only when you lose everything, that you can do anything. He has this one tie to slice free, and then he will be done.


End file.
